Status: submitted!

Proposal Summary (<20 words)

Manifund: longtermist grantmaker experimenting with regranting, impact certs and other funding mechanisms.

Project Description (<750 words)

Manifund started in Jan 2023 by building a website for impact certs for the ACX Mini-Grants round; we then hosted impact certs for the OpenPhil AI Worldviews contest. Since May, we’ve been focused on a regranting program. We’d like to scale up our regranting program, and experiment with other funding mechanisms and initiatives.

Some things that distinguish us from other longtermist funders:

• We’re steeped in the tech startup mindset: we move quickly, ship often, automate our workflows, and talk to our users.
• We’re really into transparency: all projects, writeups, and grant amounts are posted publicly on our site. We think this improves trust in the funding ecosystem, helps grantees understand what funders are interested in, and allows newer grantmakers to develop a legible track record.
• We care deeply about grantee experience: we’ve spent a lot of time on the other side of the table applying for grants, and are familiar with common pain points: long/unclear timelines, lack of funder feedback, confusing processes.
• We decentralize where it makes sense: regranting and impact certs are both funding models that play to the strengths of networks of experts. Central grantmaker time has been a bottleneck on nurturing impactful projects; we hope to fix this.

Overall, we hope to help OpenPhil decentralize funding to other decisionmakers in a way that rewards transparent, accountable, timely and cost-effective grants.

Scaling up regranting

Regranting is a system where individuals are given small discretionary budgets to make grants from. This allow regrantors to find projects in their personal and professional networks, seed new projects based on their interests, and commit to grantees with little friction. Our current regrantors are drawn from Anthropic, OpenAI, Rethink Priorities, ARC Evals, CAIS, FAR AI, SERI MATS, 1DaySooner and others; see all regrantors here, and a recent payout report here.

With further funding, we’d like to:

• Onboard new regrantors: we currently have a waitlist of qualified regrantors and get about one new strong application per week. We think we could find many more promising candidates over the next year, to sponsor with budgets of $50k to $400k.
• Increase budgets of high-performing regrantors: this incentivizes regrantors to make good grants, delegates authority to people who have performed well in the past, and quantifies their track record.
• Hire another team member: Our team is currently just 2 people, both of us are wearing a lot of hats, and one (Austin) spends ~30% of his time on Manifold. We’re interested in finding a fulltime in-house grantmaker for grant evaluation, regrantor assessment, and public comms. Ideally, this person would take on a cofounder-like role and weigh in on Manifund strategy. Later, we may want to hire another engineer or ops role.

Running a larger test of impact certs